The Balliols (78 page)

“The plump, rather handsome woman?”

“Yes; that's his wife.”

“And I'd meant it to end there, really I had.” Helen explained to me, “I'm not the kind of girl to chase after other people's husbands. I thought: ‘That's that. And I'm out of luck.' But it wasn't easy
in a place like this, where you keep seeing the same people every day; when you can't help seeing them, when you're playing games, and sitting round with them afterwards over drinks. It happens without your realizing that it is happening. First you become friends and then …”

She paused: looking away; such an abstract, tender expression on her face as I had seen sometimes on her mother's: a kind of trance.

“It was at a dinner that it happened, that it began; that I … that we really knew.”

It had been at one of the Saturday dinner dances that are one of the features of the hotel's life. She had been at the Rickman's table. He was at the far end, six places away from her. She was glad that she was not sitting next to him. At any informal moment, on the tennis-court or golf course; when they were turning the pages of a newspaper on the sun porch over their evening cocktail, she felt more at ease with him than with any man that she had ever known. But on formal occasions she felt constrained. When she was set down beside him at a dinner table, knowing she had to talk to him, she could not think of anything to say. They were too intimate to make light talk. She was afraid of their talk becoming over-serious on occasions when seriousness would come amiss. She was glad she was not sitting next to him.

She had turned to the man beside her. She had begun to make easy talk. It had been smooth and friendly, enjoyable; no effort; just enjoyment. Then suddenly there had been a pause: she turned. She was conscious of Roy watching her. She had looked across. She had looked up. Their eyes had met.

She looked; then looked away.

She closed her eyes.

She had read about people exchanging looks like that: looks that made your breath check; that took the place of words; that made you think: “Yes, that's how it is. He feels in the way I do.” She had read about looks like that. She had not believed in them; or rather, she had wanted to believe in them but had been sceptical as her generation was sceptical of “big words.” But it was true, all right. She knew that now. It was about the one thing of which she could be sure.

But this for very certain she did know: that she was proud to be capable of such emotion, she had been so afraid that she would never feel this way. She had been afraid that she was hard-boiled, or shallow; that she was not big enough for big emotions. She had met men, who had attracted her, men whom it had been fun to flirt with, who had thrilled her in a way. But she had never mistaken it for the real thing.
They had been something to pass the time, to decorate a moment. Even with Kenneth, she had felt … but what was it she had felt for Kenneth? Something so different. A kind of playfellow feeling. She had felt alive when she was with him. But you felt alive when you were playing tennis. Kenneth was so much of her own age. They met as equals. There couldn't be any sweeping off her feet. It wasn't like this. This
was
the real thing.

“It
is
the real thing,” she assured me. “If only it weren't so difficult. If there weren't his wife. If she wasn't so nice. For she is: terribly nice: the kind of woman I could be friends with: the kind of friend that Helen's always needed: someone older than myself; who could advise me; guide me; who could be impersonally affectionate; who wouldn't think I was in competition with her; to whom I could chatter about all my woman problems: not just clothes and face creams; the realer things; how to run one's life. She's been through it all before. She'd know what the road was like. She could tell me. I've always wanted somebody like this.

“If only she were not Roy's wife.…

“Though somehow I can't think of her as Roy's wife. There's such a gap between us. I'm ‘Helen' to Mrs. Rickman; I could never imagine myself calling her ‘Fane.' Between Roy and me there's no such difference. From the start I thought of him as Roy.

“And then there are the daughters and his not having any money: not more than a little pocket-money; oh, but it's a mess all right. Such a mess that if it weren't for his wife I suppose I'd take the easy course: ‘I'd say It's an impossible situation. It's all too difficult.' I'd take the second best. I'd make an affair of it and let it go at that. But when it's a case of a woman of that kind I just can't; it must be everything or not. If I can't go straight to her, face her, lay my cards on the table, say ‘Your husband and I are in love with one another. We are going to run away together.' If I can't do that, well then I won't do anything.”

“And are you going to do that?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Sometimes I think ‘yes', sometimes I think ‘no.' I suppose that it depends on him: on whether he can persuade me that he really needs me. I'm not going to spoil his life for him, but if I could make something real out of his life: if I could give him faith, ambition: he'd give anything for a son: if I could give him that. He's so fine, and he's so wasted. If I could help him make something of himself.”

Her infatuation for Roy Rickman fulfilled her two chief instincts: the need to be guided and the need to have a purpose to her life. The dice were heavily loaded against Kenneth.

I asked her about Roy Rickman. A good deal I knew: that his wife was rich: that he had retired from business after the war: that she had encouraged him to retire: he had earned his leisure, she had assured him. Acquaintances had suggested another reason: that his lack of employment, and consequent lack of money would give her a hold on him that might be valuable later on. That I knew. But there were other things I did not know. Had he hobbies: interests: ambitions of any other kind?

Helen shook her head. “He's no one to be ambitious for. If he had a son … if there was some one to work for. Some one who depended on him.”

“Does he ever write poetry now?”

The war boom in verse was over. I had not seen Roy's name in print for seven years.

Helen flushed at my question.

“He says he wrote nothing for ten years. Nothing inspired him. But he's writing now.”

“Sonnets.”

She nodded. “He seems to do one every day. They just pour out, he says. He sits at a table: for half an hour or so: and they write themselves.”

I thought how Frank Tallent's lips would have curled at the description.

“But if you run away together, I take it that he's not proposing to support you on the proceeds of his sonnets?”

The extent of her infatuation may be gauged from her taking of my question seriously.

“Oh no,” she assured me. “He would still write poems of course, but I'd want him to have a real career.”

At fifty I thought! But Roy was strong: he was capable: he sat lightly in the saddle. He might make something of a career if he were forced. He could organize. He was good with men. There might be employment for his particular capacities in public life, at a time of crisis. Helen
was
right. He might make something of his life, if he had her.

“All the same,” I said, “though you have talked a lot about his wife making things difficult for you, you don't seem to have taken her into any particular account.”

“What do you mean?”

“You've talked about what you feel for Roy, what Roy feels for you; whether you would ruin Roy's life or make it; but you don't seem to have considered what Fane Rickman's likely to think about it all.”

“Oh, but we have. That's one of the very first things I asked him: what would his wife feel: did she really need him.”

“What did he say to that?”

“That they were capital friends. That they got on very well together. But that it was her daughters that she really cared for: that she might miss him, but he wasn't essential to her.”

“Then you don't think she suspects anything?”

“Good heavens no. She's middle aged herself; with all that sort of thing miles back in her past: she thinks it's the same way with Roy.”

“You're certain of that?”

“Oh quite.”

“And Roy agrees?”

“Of course he does. Fane Rickman hasn't the least suspicion that we're anything more than friends.”

I had only seen Fane Rickman twice: a long while back. But if I had been in their position I should not have been so confident of her credulity.

Helen was not alone, however, in thinking that she lived in a fool's paradise. Later that afternoon, two women of advanced and accepted middle age were drawing the obvious comparisons between her and Roy. They were talking of Roy's fitness, agility, youthfulness.

“Whereas Fane …” said one of them.

“Exactly; whereas Fane.…”

They exchanged a meaning glance.

“If I were Fane I wouldn't know a moment's peace of mind. I'm very glad now that I married a man twenty years older than myself. At the time I'll admit I thought it rather dull, but it's a great relief when one's in the forties not to have to compete with children of nineteen, dieting to look thin, exercising to keep young.”

“Not that Fane bothers much about dieting and exercise.”

“My dear, that's exactly what I was saying to her the other day. She's forty-five and she looks it. She's beautiful, still, in a way; I'll admit that. But she's plump, definitely. She plays no games. While Roy's not got an ounce of fat on him, looks magnificent, is a scratch golfer, can beat men twenty years younger than himself at tennis. I told her that she should be careful; that she should keep herself young. One can so easily these days: ‘My dear,' I said, ‘you're
asking for trouble if you let yourself get middle aged when your husband can mix on equal terms with girls of twenty.'”

“You told her that?”

“I certainly did.”

“And what had she to say?”

“That a woman should be her age; that she wasn't going to beat people at their game, they had to beat her at hers.”

“Whatever that may mean.”

“Exactly: whatever that may mean.”

“Look at her now.”

She was walking from the hotel veranda towards the tennis-court. Her dress, which was trailing and loose, precluded hurry; a parasol lay behind her shoulder. Her movements were slow and rhythmed. She wore no hat. Her hair was dark, low-rolled at the neck. Her skin was pale, her eyelashes very long and dark. Her mouth was full. Her shoulders white and rounded. Her neck and throat were smooth. You could tell that in her youth she had been a beauty. And in her way she was lovely still; with the loveliness of a September morning where all is calm, windless, warm and mellow.

The women on the terrace exchanged a glance.

“She's the kind of woman that the twenty-five-year-old hero of a French novel would go crazy over.”

“But a man of Roy's age?”

“Exactly.”

My eyes followed her. It might be of course that they were right: that she saw nothing, that she suspected nothing; or it might be that she had decided to shut her eyes, in her confidence that nothing that Roy might do or feel could injure his relationship with her. Nothing certainly could have been friendlier than her behaviour to Helen during those days when Helen was pondering the alternatives of “Yes” and “No.”

I was uncertain what Fane was feeling; I was still more uncertain as to what Roy was feeling. I did not really believe that in his sober moments he wanted to break a marriage that had survived successfully the chances and changes of close on twenty years; I suspected that he had begun a romance light-heartedly; that he had mistaken Helen for one of the casual-hearted post-war girls with whom he had no doubt shared casual hours; that he was unprepared for her seriousness; that he had never expected to be taken at his word; that her seriousness had been both a surprise and an
intoxicant; that he had felt he was having his youth restored to him; that he was helpless now.

When a man has once set himself an objective he forgets the reason and wisdom of his decision. In the same way that having once started to play a game he is resolved to win, and does not in the playing of it pause to wonder whether he was wise to have begun the playing. Roy, having once burnt his boats, having once made his avowal, received his answer, was not considering the outcome of the “yes,” but only the winning of it. He had to persuade Helen that he really needed her, that it would be for his happiness and her happiness that they should begin a new life together. He flung himself into an ardent wooing, with the headlong precipitancy of youth.

All through that week, they were in each other's constant company —on the golf course, on the tennis-court, dancing together in the evenings. They were always together, but never alone. His wooing was sandwiched into odd moments. The difficulties that surrounded them made his words more intense.

There is an eternal quality in love that makes it possible for lovers to exist and be happy in the moment, since the moment contains eternity. There is a capacity in love to transport lovers on to another plane, so that they can believe true what they would think true; so that they can justify behaviour that at the bar of any ordinary tribunal would be derided. They do with pride what without love they would do with guilt.

Helen moved through those hours in a dream. She could not feel that it was real; yet it was so lovely that she prayed it might be. She had never met a man that she admired so; who had the dignity of worldly success yet could meet young people at their own game; who could speak with authority, yet be gay and frivolously light-hearted when the occasion fitted. He was handsome with the formed look of maturity, not the emptiness of youth. He was young enough to be a companion, and strong enough for her to rely upon: to plan her life for her, to make decisions for her. She had never felt that about any man before. Yet it would not be a one-sided marriage. He needed her as much as she needed him. She could make a big thing of his life for him. If only he were free!